


unsettle the ground, send your waters ashore

by gemkazoni



Category: YuYu Hakusho
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 01:50:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemkazoni/pseuds/gemkazoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yukina remembers the beginning, and all the stories that came after it. She has had so few choices afforded to her. At least there is this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	unsettle the ground, send your waters ashore

**Author's Note:**

> I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT ICE MAIDENS, OKAY. To me, Yukina has a lot of depth and pain that the series only barely touched on; her statement about how her people "deserved to die," in particular, was very telling about her true feelings for them and what her life must have been like before she left the glacial village, I felt. So I tried to capture that atmosphere in this fic as best I could. Uh, enjoy?

Yukina remembers the beginning. 

Much later, she will learn that humans are very different than demons in this regard, their infants helpless and unknowing. It was not like that at all for her. She remembers light, and noise, and the feeling of hands. She remembers voices, harsh and plentiful and some so loud but her mother’s wails raising above them all, the sound a terrible, unending storm. She remembers someone setting her down, and then not being held again for a long time. She remembers being hungry. She remembers being very, very cold. 

The memory of that cold, the suddenness of it, is what has lived in her bones the longest. It makes sense, she realizes when she is older. Her brother’s heat had engulfed her as they’d grown inside their mother, so completely that her body had learned it as the truth, as how it would always be. It feels fitting that she did not know just how numb the world truly was until he was gone.  


  


*

  


She knows the story well.

What a sad, shameful child, they had said of her, this orphan, this daughter of ice who was not a daughter at all but a _twin_ , a strange word on all their tongues. She was smaller than the other babies, and so quiet. For a time, they thought she would not survive to see the winter solstice. Such an end seemed right; they had buried her mother in a plain grave where she could easily be forgotten, foolish, contemptuous child that she was, and the cursed boy had become only a terrible memory, distant now, more distant still with each day that passed. She would follow them soon into the dark, blood upon blood upon the same, tainted blood, and not a trace would be left. But she whimpered when left alone too long, and she turned her little face towards the light, and she did not die. The elders pursed their lips at that. By then, fear had trickled into their bones, like water that bled from warmed ice. There is fire in her eyes, they said, and the others saw it too, such a piercing, ugly color. We will banish her too, they said.

Rui clutched at their sleeves, though. She breathed, the sound heavy, raw at its edges. Her tears cracked against the floor and spun in wide circles, glinting. 

“You have been through enough,” they told her. “We must take this one last step for our own sake, and for the good of all our people. Hina brought this curse upon us, and her death is a sign that we should rid ourselves of it entirely. Only then can we truly move forward again.” 

She shook her head. Her mouth moved. The words made no sound, rendered hoarse beneath all her grief, but they were clear all the same: no, no, no. 

“She will be a burden, the likes of which you cannot even imagine.” They sighed, and the weight of it hung in the air. “But if you must, then take her.” 

And Rui had taken her.  


  


*

  


She knows that story well, and all the others too. Ice maidens’ hearts are like stones in the pits of their stomachs, too slow, too deep inside them to support such quick, volatile things as lies. She has known her place before she could even walk. She is a island in a great sea, a glacier that arches high over the land and casts shadows upon it. They call her gentle but wear their pity like clothing, always bright against their skin when they turn to face her. Such terrible eyes, they say, and smile their empty smiles, as though it means nothing at all. 

There was a time where those words always spurred her to seek out a patch of clean ice along the ground, to stare hard at her reflection until it blurred into something she could no longer recognize. The others’ eyes were bluer than ice, darker than it, but just as even, just as cold. Hers are red and bright, like wood set ablaze. Yukina touches the reflection of them in the ice and half-expects to feel warmth against her fingertips. She has never seen another with eyes like hers. All of this is truth. There is nothing she can do about it. There is nothing she can do. 

Rui had tried. She’d brushed her hair down close to her face, instructed her to look at the ground when others passed, smiling all the while as though it were a only a game they were playing. None of it had ever softened a thing – but Yukina had learned to restrain her hope a long, long time ago. The others never exclude her from their traditions, never leave her unfed or unsheltered or purposely injured. She is taught to heal by the elders, just as they have taught all the others before her. But still, she feels their distance. It is a palpable emptiness, a line in the snow that never fades. She is someone separate, someone foreign in a sly and dangerous way, still familiar enough to appear the same. She is not like them, not entirely, and they will not forget that. They will never be kind enough to let her forget that. 

Yukina takes these words inside her and builds them into something that feels almost like strength. After a time, she stops looking at her reflection. She knits ribbons from red thread and wears them in her hair.

“Remember that you are lucky,” one of the elders says to her after a lesson. She touches the other girls on the arm as she passes them, a motion that means rise, you have done what is needed, you have learned and you have grown. Yukina folds her hands against her thighs. Her palms are still humming with the rhythm of her energy. “You are a lucky child,” she says, and it is not meant to be a reassurance, only a fact. 

Yukina bows and thanks her. She goes out into the cold with the others. She walks the distance to the home she and Rui share, her ribbons bright at her neck, trembling in the wind.  


  


*

  


There was another time, too. 

She and the other girls close to her age had all been very young, and far too careless. Someone had built a fire, and playing, they’d stumbled straight into it. The others had cried, their hands and faces badly burnt until their mothers came to them and healed the wounds – but she had stepped through it and out as though she were wading through shallow water, her skin barely warmed. Only her kimono was singed in one spot, the color dark like a wound. Cursed, one of the mothers had said aloud then. Cursed, she’d yelled, again and again, as though it wasn’t being heard each time before, and Yukina, so young, had simply bowed her head and listened until someone led the maiden away.

Rui insists the story is only an old, old misunderstanding, that she’d actually fallen just to the side of it, the flames barely able to lick at her – but Yukina would prefer it to be true. She builds fires sometimes while the others sleep, little, white ones in the dead of night, the heat bleeding into each of her fingertips and spreading deep inside her. She protects them from the wind, terrible and near; she only puts them out when Rui stirs in the other room. The act calms her, reminds her of something half-known, half-remembered. As she is like ice, she imagines her brother to be so much like fire, fierce and full of vigor, frightening in a way but still of a power that would not harm her. She cannot imagine his face – she has no idea what men look like at all, all the paintings and carvings that once included them having been long destroyed, and so she does not know if they are simply shadows of women or if they are something else entirely, great beasts, phantoms – but if he is like fire, then she would not need to fear him. She would love him, as best she could. 

This, she believes.  


  


*

  


She feels the ice in her veins, feels it as if it is another limb, and that is a comfort too. This is something she shares wholly with her people; this is something she would not trade for anything in the world. She takes long walks in the snow when the wind is calm,, mesmerized by the spiraling patterns in which it falls around her, white on her shoulder, cool in her hair. She looks up at the icicles that hang from the rooftops, dazzled by how sharp they are at the ends, how they glisten in the light. 

It is dangerous, in its own way. There have been times when demons not of their race have found a way onto the island, existing only as dark, straggling shadows in the distance. Whether they are after blood, flesh, or simply shelter, it doesn’t matter. They never make it far. The ice maidens stand at the crest of their village and watch. They watch the shapes of them as they slow, then stop, then fall. They watch until the snow covers them entirely, and then they go inside and clean their hands and put their daughters to bed. 

This is true strength, an elder says, standing at her shoulder as they see yet another drop. To move in this cold, to carry it in your bones. Many do not fear it, but they should. Oh, they should. 

Yukina knows it to be true – like ice, she can be cruel, and like ice, she has a power within her, shy and careful but all-consuming if she should wish it to be – but there, in the cold, with someone taking their last breath in the distance, she looks down the row at the others, so unmovable, and does not understand. If she is ice, then must all her be so numb? 

The demon vanishes, swallowed up in white. Yukina turns her face towards the wind. She listens to the elders as they chastise the dead. She remembers the softness of the snow in her hair, the intricate shapes it leaves patterned on the windowpanes of their houses. She remembers Rui smiling down at her when she was small, saying, look, look at this, as she pressed her little hands into the warmed water she was using to wash their clothes. She’d moved her fingers through it. She’d showed her how it flowed, how it gathered in her palm, how it settled and resettled against her touch. 

Look, she’d said. Ice can become many things.  


  


*

  


She visits her mother’s grave often. 

The sight of footsteps in the snow leading to and from it is a welcome sight, even if they are her own. Yukina did not know her – only shadows, the memory of a hand and a mouth, the way she sounded as she wept – but she has seen pieces of her left through the village that others had forgotten to clear away, her name painstakingly etched into a slab of stone, pieces of fabric from a kimono that once belonged to her left in the collection of materials now meant for others. She still has the tear that was meant just for her, worn snug at her neck. 

She rolls it across her fingertips, relishing the smoothness of it; she touches the snow that covers her mother with the same hand, as though to cast a thread between them, as though to communicate something intense and precious that cannot be shared any other way. She will cry for her, so much that it will make up for all the women in the village who do not. If she could not be enough for her in life, then she will be enough now. 

Rui does not come, but she mourns too, in her own ways. Her tears hang from the walls of their home in strands, have been gathered in pots and jars kept on high shelves. Yukina knows she suffers from nightmares, too – not always, not even often, but they come to her still, in the quietest moments. 

(She has learned many things about Rui from the others – that in her life, she has given birth to three daughters, two of whom have grown old and distanced themselves from her, one who died after only four days. She knows that she and her mother had been the dearest of friends, born only hours apart. She knows that Rui was the first one to find her, crouched over in the snow as if in prayer, the stain her blood had left already half-buried by a new storm.) 

Yukina does not ask her about the past, though. She only climbs into bed with her on the nights that seem most painful. She only tries to stay still, so still as Rui reaches out and grips at her, her hands tight at her shoulders, and does not let go, as if to keep her safe from some immeasurable force, as if to say _please, not her, not her too_.  


  


*

  


These are her people, and this is her home. She has never known anything else. There are times where she wonders if perhaps the world entire is like this, all barren lands and mountains, all dark bodies and shimmers of hair and hands that come close but do not touch you. Maybe it is worse.

That thought always makes her feel guilty, but still, she cannot help what she feels. There are times she looks at these women, so tall and still, and she thinks: you have taken my mother and brother from me, the only ones who were ever truly a part of me, my flesh and blood, my insides. You have taken everything and left me with only my eyes, and my hands, and what can I do with them? There are times when she watches the elders’ thick feet shuffle past her as she and the others kneel and she thinks: you deserve to die, don’t you? This numbness, this cruelty that masquerades as a terrible, terrible mercy, it should not be allowed to exist any longer. 

(There are times where she remembers what Rui told her about her brother, that he would return and seek his revenge one day, and all she can think is, good. Let him come. If he is lost, then she will seek him out and show him the way herself. She will stand with him as he kills them all. And if he has become so consumed with hatred that he turns on her as well, she will take the blow and not cower. If it all she can give him, then so be it. She has had so few choices afforded to her in her life. At least she will have that. ) 

She finds space for other, softer feelings, though. They are her people, but she is not like them, not entirely – she does not have to share their fear, or their cruelty, or their lack of empathy. She does not always have to be like the ice, even as if it throbs in her veins. She can be snow. She can be water. 

So she stands with them as they perform rituals, as they acknowledge milestones, as they bury their dead. She helps string the tears they all cry, boring holes through the gems until her fingertips bleed. When the mother who once called her cursed comes to her for help with healing, she does not turn her away, but leads her in, and shows her how. 

It is hard to balance her hatred, to coat it with kindness. It is hard to carve at every raw feeling until it is as smooth and small as one of her tears. 

But Yukina tries.  


  


*

  


When it all comes down to it, she doesn’t have a plan at all. It simply happens. 

She goes to her mother’s grave early one day. The others haven’t yet roused themselves, all the doors she passes in the village closed and so, so still. She kneels there and whispers a few words, quick and warm, into the deep snow; she stands and looks out across the quiet and even land. For the past few months, a horrible storm has raged night and day, but at last, it is over. The next one will come shortly, but for now, for a few days, the sky will be clear, and the snow will be thick and clean and all so startlingly white. 

Yukina breathes easy. She looks back at the village, so small, all of it nearly swallowed up except for the dark-edged outlines of the houses. She has never gone farther from it than here, not once in her life. There has never been a reason to do so. 

She starts to walk away from it.

With every step, she thinks: this is it, this is where I will turn back, now, _now_. She is only pretending, a child playing games when it is time to be serious. What will Rui think? Where will she go? She knows nothing of the world at all, its lands, its creatures. She has not brought anything useful with her. All she has is her mother’s tear, swinging at her neck as she moves – but she touches a fingertip to it, slow and lingering, and the movement strengthens her, ignites the rawest, warmest piece inside of her, a scrap of true fire amidst all the ice that is hers and hers alone. She wonders what her mother thought of as she made her own trek across the land – if she were brave, or angry, or simply scared. What convinced her to leave? What led her back? 

After what feels like a lifetime, she reaches the end. The wind is colder here, cutting at the white clouds as they pass. A thin shape of ice shimmers up at her, just past her toes and the dark, jagged edge of the land. She has heard much about the Bridge – that it forms only for a few weeks each year before melting away, that it is the only way to come and go from the island. The others spoke of it with distant, wondering tones though, as if it were only a fairytale, a dream. Now that Yukina sees it with her own eyes, everything around her seems to solidify at last. She is leaving. She does not know when she is coming back. 

Maybe she won’t come back. 

She looks back only once. She cannot see the village any longer, not even the roofs. The island has eaten them, Yukina thinks. It has eaten their bodies at last, just as it once did with their hearts. 

She steels herself. She steps down onto the Bridge and runs. 

It is all a blur, then. The wind cuts at her face, almost painful, and she is starting to feel warm, too warm beneath her kimono, warm in a way she only knew once before, at the very beginning of it all, and she thinks of Rui, Rui who loved her, Rui who will be sad to find she has gone but who will go on without her, just as she went on without her mother, and she will be fine, she will be _fine_ , Yukina must believe that, and her arms feel lighter now, freer, as though all her strings have been cut, and she is so warm now, so warm, too warm, and –

The ice cracks then disappears from under her. With a shout, she falls.

The land is not too far away; she hits it soundly, her face pressed firm to a surface that feels too solid, too uneven to truly be the ground. The change in temperature strikes her all at once, a rush of movement in the air; the cold is gone, replaced by a heat that burrows deep in her kimono and clings. She lifts herself up onto her knees, then her feet. She opens her eyes. 

_Oh_. 

She saw this sight once in etching an elder made, tall and intricate, like giants. What were they called? 

She remembers just as she touches a small hand to the dark body of one. Trees. 

They spread out all around her, as far as she can see. The sky is red, red like her ribbon, red like her eyes. A cry echoes in the distance, sharp, almost pained, and the sound makes her shiver. She squeezes her tear then tucks it beneath the collar of her kimono where it can’t be seen. It rests close to her heart, and for a moment, she thinks of its (her) twin, somewhere in the land that spread outs all around her; the thought makes her feel not quite so small and aimless, as though she’s been tethered to something real. 

She pulls at her sandals until they sit snug between her toes; she touches her fingertips to her hair, tucking it past her ears. There is nothing to be scared of, she tells herself – maybe later, maybe soon, but not now. The world has opened to her at last; she will be a part of it, and that is her choice and hers alone. She is a part of it. 

Yukina steadies herself against the tree a moment longer. She smiles. She breathes. And then she begins to walk.


End file.
